This session offers a whistle stop tour of three initiatives at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada that illustrate the three themes of the event. As such it offers an introduction to these areas and provides the opportunity to reflect on the practical application of best practices in social.

Plenary Session 2Leveraging All Your Employees for Social Media Success

At 55K followers on their French and English Twitter accounts, Ottawa Public Health has one of the largest followings on Twitter of all local public health units in North America, ahead of NYC, Boston, Toronto, LA, even ahead of Public Health Ontario and only slightly behind the nation-wide Public Health Agency of Canada.

In this session you will learn how the organization has trained it's employees to engage effectively in social. Their approach would, by design, have a strong health component - as that is their area of expertise. Since its inception a number of years ago the Social Media policy has the purpose of keeping employees safe when engaging in social media. You will hear how they encourage, train and guide employees to use social media in their daily work.

You will hear about using social media for health promotion messaging, risk communications, urgent messaging….with a strong focus on 2-way engagement. By tapping into metrics and sentiment, Ottawa Public Health also uses social media to adapt and improve their programming as well as to try and predict and prepare for coming or developing issues.

During this first of three sessions you will get the opportunity to share your experiences with your peers.

This first conversation will focus on Innovation. In a roundtable discussion, you are invited to share an innovative approach you have applied in your social media practice and how it has impacted the way you communicate on social media.

Whether your initiative succeeded or failed we want to hear from you. This roundtable discussion is an opportunity to learn from your peers.

Discussion will focus on 3 questions:

On a 10 point scale, how innovative do you rate your organization's social media?

What one change could you make that would result in more innovation?

Share an example of innovation - either something you have done recently or that you are planning to do

One of the best sources of learning is from your peers. Each year attendees ask us for more time to discuss and learn from one another. This year we have built the agenda to accommodate-these table top discussions will provide peer-to-peer learning and discussion time. Three sessions have been peppered strategically to focus on lessons learned as it relates to innovation, integration and impact. This will give you an opportunity to extend your learnings at the event by hearing from your peers, sharing your experiences and discussing what you have heard so far.

Have you ever found yourself wasting a considerable amount of time performing some annoying, repetitive process within a common application, social media website, or your web browser? Wish there was a "magic" shortcut or simply a better way of getting it done? There most likely is.

While having a solid strategy should always be the first priority before engaging in the digital/social media space, it's also smart to arm yourself with a set of tools that will help you with the tactical implementation of your plan. In this practical, on-screen demonstration-based session, you will be provided with 30 tools and tips hand-picked from personal experience, day-to-day observations and interactions with his consulting and training clients.

While on the surface, some tools may not seem to relate to your specific field or industry, rest assured they will help you with your efficiency and effectiveness in today's digital world, where agility and "life-hacking" skills are becoming increasingly valued.

Developing and implementing a successful social media strategy in regulated, risk-sensitive industries can be a challenge. Even the idea of being innovative can be daunting. How you navigate the dynamics of your organizational environment is an essential part of developing buy in. Without it, even great strategies can fail.

At WorkSafeBC, the internal social media education plan resulted in increased trust of the social team and a comfort level with social media that has allowed the organization to evolve and grow, increase its social presence, and engage external stakeholders.

This session will share WorkSafeBC's journey from mere presence on social media, to a formalized strategy for yearly growth-a strategy that wouldn't have been possible without an innovative approach to internal education.

Plenary Session 6From Word to Image to Video—Essentials in Visual Storytelling for Social Media

Great communicators tell stories. But how do you do this via social media where all you might have is 280 characters and a link or single image?

In this session we will discuss how you can transform social media into a channel for effective story telling. The result? Increased engagement, improved communication and perhaps most importantly, standing out in a crowd.

Drawing on real life examples of social media use, Captain Ian Grant will discuss projects such as sailing on a Royal Canadian Navy ship from Guam to Hong Kong filming Instagram Stories. The intent and messaging is to support recruitment for naval trades by telling the stories of members aboard. What's their job? What do they like about the Navy? What's challenging? How do they deal with life at sea?

This second round table sessions will focus on how you have integrated social into your organizations communications strategy.

Following the format of the first table discussion you will be invited to explore the following questions:

On a 10 point scale, how integrated is social with your organization's overall communications strategy?

What one change could you make that would result in greater integration?

Share an example of integration-either something you have done recently or that you are planning to do.

One of the best sources of learning is from your peers. Each year attendees ask us for more time to discuss and learn from one another. This year we have built the agenda to accommodate-these table top discussions will provide peer-to-peer learning and discussion time. Three sessions have been peppered strategically to focus on lessons learned as it relates to innovation, integration and impact. This will give you an opportunity to extend your learnings at the event by hearing from your peers, sharing your experiences and discussing what you have heard so far.

Plenary Session 8Social Media Trends—What to Look Out For in the Coming Year And Beyond

In a world of rapid change it is no exaggeration to say that social media is one of the areas that is growing faster and changing more than nearly any other.

And while there are no facts about the future as a practitioner in the field you have to be aware of current developments and prepare accordingly. But where can you turn for practical insight into an uncertain future.

There are few organizations better placed to provide that insight than Hootsuite, one of Canada's most successful hi-tech organizations of recent years. Their Social Barometer Report benchmarks how businesses around the world use social media, including their preferred social media initiatives, what social networks they use, and their biggest social media challenges.

In this session Camille Dundas will share Hootsuite's latest insights. Among the things she will discuss will be:

What social networks organizations are using, why and which ones are growing

The top social media challenges facing organizations around the world today

How the traditional tactics that you've used will shift to meet the demands of digitally-native consumers and the expectations of personalization

How advertising and content formats will change as consumers retreat to private communities and personalized arenas

Plenary Session 9Social Media Discovery: The Failure of Big Data and the Birth of the New #AI, Addressing The Role That Clean Data Will Play in AI

What does the deluge of social data, the rise of bots, and the future of artificial intelligence mean for you and your organization?

This session discusses how to maintain a human perspective in today's highly automated social media landscape. There are currently 500,000 people working on cleaning data for AI training and while Google and Facebook are open sourcing their AI code bases, they are closing off the access to their social data.

What does this mean for the success of social media and AI projects in your organization? Learn about the difference between social media discovery and searching; the importance of bots; the future of human social media analysis; algorithms; and the AI hierarchy needs and the impact on your business.

Thursday, October 18, 2018

Plenary Session 10Are You Making An Impact? How to Measure and Share your Results in the Government of Canada World

At the end of the day two things determine the success of your social media activities:

Are you impacting your audience and furthering the mandate of your organization?

Are you demonstrating this to senior management so your efforts continue to get their support?

In the rapidly changing world of social you must constantly review your measurement and analytics strategy while also updating your internal communications to ensure others recognize your contribution.

In this session, Sabrina Nash will share what's worked for her in both these key areas and how you can analyze your effectiveness to build a business case for social.

Plenary Session 11Why Did That Go Viral? Key Components of a Social Media Movement

When it comes to measuring the impact of social media one of the key questions is what makes a specific campaign or social media artifact go viral. How do you go from a common theme to a meme?

In this session, Kasia Majewski will share the essentials of a recent social media campaign that was named campaign of the year from Ottawa Tourism. Combining social media and an "experiential stunt", this campaign nearly rivalled the previous year's inflatable dinosaurs roving around Ottawa that garnered over 1 million views on Facebook.

Plenary Session 12Table Discussion 3: How do You Have Impact and How do You Measure It?

What was your most impactful social media campaign? What do you think most contributed to its success? What lessons did you learn?

Ultimately it is the impact of social media that matters and this third discussion session will provide an opportunity for you to reflect on the impact you are having and learn about what is working for your peers.

Our three questions for this session will be:

What for you is the most important measure of impact?

What would you most like to measure if you could, or what measure would you like to stop using?

Share some details and lessons learned from your most impactful social media campaign or activity.

One of the best sources of learning is from your peers. Each year attendees ask us for more time to discuss and learn from one another. This year we have built the agenda to accommodate-these table top discussions will provide peer-to-peer learning and discussion time. Three sessions have been peppered strategically to focus on lessons learned as it relates to innovation, integration and impact. This will give you an opportunity to extend your learnings at the event by hearing from your peers, sharing your experiences and discussing what you have heard so far.

Plenary Session 13Trust, Tolerance, Social Support, Community and Political Engagement—Pew Research Study of the use of Social Media in the US

Questions have been raised about the social impact of widespread use of social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Do these technologies isolate people and truncate their relationships? Or are there benefits associated with being connected to others in this way? The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project decided to examine SNS in a survey that explored people's overall social networks and how use of these technologies is related to trust, tolerance, social support, and community and political engagement.

The findings presented in this session paint a rich and complex picture of the role that digital technology plays in people's social worlds.